Oswego, NY — Richard and Josephine Hyse, the couple found dead in their Oswego home Monday, lived the American Dream of immigrants who achieved success in their new country.

The Hyses, natives of Berlin, survived Nazi forced labor camps and arrived in New York City in 1947 as displaced persons, according to a 2006 biography in the Oswego alumni magazine.

Over the next six decades, Dr. Richard Hyse became noted in academic circles and both Hyses became prominent in Oswego community affairs and the arts.

Oswego police, answering a welfare call, found the couple dead Monday in their 207 E. Seventh St. home. The circumstances remain under investigation, police said this morning.

Richard Hyse, 89, was an emeritus economics professor at the State University of New York at Oswego and a Regents fellow of the State University of New York.

He was working in a Brooklyn shipyard and Josephine as a seamstress when his uncle encouraged him to go to college, Hyse said in the interview with Oswego magazine. He enrolled in night school at the Baruch College in New York City, eventually earned his doctorate at New York University and joined the Oswego State faculty as its sole economist in 1961.

Hyse founded and directed the college’s business program and was the first chairman of its economics department. He drafted the first bylaws of Oswego State’s Faculty Assembly and was the first president of the college’s chapter of United University Professions. A campus academic honor, the Richard Hyse Outstanding Achievement Award, is given annually in his name to an outstanding economics student.

In 2005 he published “Markets, Power and Wealth.” Subtitled “A Critique of an Ideology.” The book argues that individualism provides limited solutions to economic problems and fails as a basis for public policy because it ignores the impact of institutions on economic activity.

Hyse also was the author of what his biography called the only English translation of Simonde de Sismondi’s “New Principles of Political Economy.” Sismondi, a 19th century economist, recorded the first economic depression following the Napoleanic Wars and laid down principles later elaborated by Karl Marx.

Hyse also wrote letters to the editors of The New York Times, commenting on subjects ranging from the 1944 Bretton Woods conference that rebuilt the world economy to the Spike Lee film, “Jungle Fever.” He also wrote to The Post-Standard and Syracuse Herald-Journal discussing politics and education.

Oswego residents also know Hyse as a co-founder and treasurer of the Oswego Opera Theatre, and as treasurer of the Children’s Center of Oswego, a child care center and preschool.

Josephine Hyse, 86, a graphic artist and watercolorist, maintained a studio on the second floor of the couple’s home. She was exhibition chair of the former Oswego Art Guild for more than 20 years. The Jo Hyse Gallery at the Oswego Civic Arts Center is named for her.